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I just finished a six-week video production class and made a mini-documentary. Here it is!

My undergraduate degree is in photography, and thanks to Louisville, Not Kentucky, I also knew how to edit audio going into this project. In college, many of my friends (and my husband) studied film and video. I never got to video. I was probably afraid of it, and rightly so -- it’s all the worries of photography, combined with all the audio worries, plus the usual worry of hauling expensive, school-owned equipment on the metro and making sure it all works and is picking up the right things… it was an anxious six weeks. Of course, combining audio and photography also lets you do wonderful things you can’t do with stills and sound alone. And I’ve always enjoyed fiddling with something for hours until it’s perfect and I’m hungry and exhausted, so I loved having the opportunity to do that kind of creative work again.

These oysters not shucked by Gardner Douglas.

Some random lessons I learned (or remembered, because there are certainly transferable photo and audio lessons) during this process:

Like bourbon at a Kentucky wedding, you can never have enough b-roll.

Introduce yourself to people, even if you think they know who you are.

Put your phone and metro card in different pockets. Otherwise, you might pull out your metro card with your phone, and it might fall into an open construction site behind a chain-link fence.

You can eat farmed oysters outside of “R” months.

Do not eat a warm oyster, especially when a nationally-ranked oyster shucker tells you he’s not going to eat it because it’s been sitting in the sun for an hour while you conduct an interview. There's a reason for serving oysters on ice. They're disgusting warm and raw.

Tip your oyster shucker!

The U.S. Oyster Festival takes place annually in Leonardtown, Maryland on the third weekend in October. Let's go.